I spun around, almost in a circle. I was ready to cry.
Wrong—I had fucked up, I was completely wrong. She had not come to the cottage.
Now what the hell was I going to do? It was one thing to fantasize that I’d search the whole country for her, but the SIM knew I was in the country. If they didn’t drop out of the sky at any moment, I’d be picked up before I made it back to Puerto Plata. I was probably as close to the Haiti border as I was to Puerto Plata, but they would be watching border crossings.
I went outside, cursing my stupidity. I thought I knew her. But hell, I thought I knew her after living with her for two years only to find out that she had one layer of secrets stacked atop another.
I couldn’t stick around here long. I had to get away from the cottage and plantation, pronto. They couldn’t have kept track of my car during the night after I got rid of all the lights, but once I pointed the way, I had no doubt Johnny Mena would figure out where Luz was hiding. He had all the resources of the country at hand. And I had tired feet and a million mosquito bites.
“Nick.”
I felt like I had fallen off the edge of the world.
Luz stood at the bottom of the clearing that separated the cottage yard from banana trees. She was thin and haggard and looked like she had been through the ringer, which she had.
But she was the most beautiful woman in the world to me.
“What—” She stopped. “How did you get here?”
“Mosquitoes flew me.” I slapped one on my neck.
“What happened to your face?”
“Mena’s boys gave me an attitude adjustment.”
“Why did you come?” she asked.
“There’s no one else in the world for me, Luz.”
“No, no, you have to go. You don’t understand, they’re going to find me, it’s just a matter of time.”
I heard the familiar chop-chop-chop sound in the near distance.
60
I ran to her and grabbed her arm. “Let’s go. We gotta get out of here.”
She stumbled along with me as I led her into the thick plantation growth. “It’s no use, they’ll find us. Go hide, I’ll distract them. They’re after me, not you.”
I stopped and stared at her.
“Who the hell do you think you are? You’re not the only hero in this world. I came here to get you and I’m not leaving without you. C’mon.”
I led her into the thick terrain. We passed a campsite. It was Luz’s. She hadn’t been staying in the house, but camped out nearby. It was a smart move. Searchers might have shown up and left figuring the house looked empty and not recently occupied.
A couple hundred yards from the house, the terrain started climbing until it peaked several hundred feet above the flat level where the cottage stood. After that, there were more peaks and valleys as the elevation rose higher.
We stopped for a breath at the top of a ridge. We crouched in the bushes to stay out of sight. Beneath us a helicopter had found the cottage. It was hovering near it.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” she said.
“Yeah, me too. You should have just shot me.”
Her eyes misted. She touched the raw scratches and raised insect bites on my face. “I don’t know how you can forgive me.”
“I haven’t forgiven you, you’re a bitch. I came because I love you. Forgiveness is something else.”
She shook her head. “There’s no place to go. I can already hear another helicopter. They’ll beat these bushes until they find us.”
“We’re going over there.” I pointed to a point southwest from our position. “There used to be a lake there, if I remember right.”
“What good will that do us?”
“I need a bath. C’mon.”
I led her through the dense growth. From the sounds coming from the other side of the ridge, another chopper or two had arrived. I didn’t need a crystal ball to get the picture—they would be unloading men to make a search. And they would know I had been there. Luz had been careful not to disturb the dust in the house. I hadn’t been.
I heard the yelp of dogs and exchanged looks with her.
“Bastards,” I said. “They’ve got bloodhounds. You really know how to piss off people, don’t you? Let’s go.”
We kept pushing toward the lake. When we reached the top of the ridge overlooking the lake, we could see the helicopter on the ground near the cottage and another one making sweeps over the plantation.
The lake was below us, a narrow dark green, murky puddle of warm water, a couple hundred yards long and only forty or fifty feet wide.
Luz had been quiet up to now mainly because she was too busy breathing as we made our way up the hills and vales.
“Nick, I don’t understand. What are we doing here? How are we going to get away?”
“Shhhh. Listen.”
We listened. There was the sound of helicopter chopper blades, and the bay of hounds.
“All I hear is—”
“Shhhh. I think I hear it.”
She shook her head. She thought I was mad. Maybe I was.
“Hear what?” she whispered.
“The wings of an angel.”
The sound became more obvious. It was a buzz, not unlike the buzz of an electric saw.
The plane came over the top of the ridge, flying low—a seaplane, not something off the production line, but the kind of plane that Lindbergh would have flown if he had wanted a puddle-jumper with pontoons.
“Who is it?”
“Suez.”
* * *
We didn’t get much chance to talk until we were in Corozal. I figured it was a safer bet to have Suez fly us back to the colony than Puerto Rico. San Juan was too close to the Dominican Republic, too infested with SIM.
Suez left us off at his house while he went to stay with friends. I guess he figured Luz and I needed some time alone. I walked around his backyard, getting reacquainted with the Suez Canal, while Luz sat in the shade. I had been the one who did what little talking there was along the way, mostly just explaining how I got involved, how I had sent Sam Denver and his submarine out as a decoy and arranged with Suez to pick us up and fly us out.
Now that it was all over, I don’t think either of us knew how to start an intimate conversation. I wasn’t interested in hearing it and she wasn’t eager to provide details about what happened between her and Trujillo.
This wasn’t about another man, a country, or a revolution. I didn’t give a damn if millions had a better life because of her sacrifice—I wasn’t into sacrifice to save anyone. And I really didn’t believe anyone would give a damn about her sacrifice, or that the poor bastards in that country were going to be any better off just because one strongman got his comeuppance. There was always another waiting in line to take the place of the recently departed.
This was between the two of us, no one else, and nothing else. It was about love and love lost, about betrayal, redemption, giving up or starting over. It was about whether it was possible to forgive and forget without getting answers to questions that were sure to doom the relationship.
I didn’t know what to say, what to do, how to approach her, what to ask, whether there was forgiveness in me.
“You’re never going to forgive me, are you?”
I was kneeling by the canal and stood up as she came up beside me.
“You always said you feared the loss of someone you loved more than anything in the world. Now you’ll never forgive or forget.”
I shrugged. “Forgiving and forgetting is bullshit. Those are words people use. No one really forgives and forgets, they just stop talking about it, stick it under covers and pretend it went away.”
“I don’t want to lose you again, Nick,” she said.
“Yeah, it was tough throwing me to the dogs while you went out saving the world.” I shook my head. “I was hurt. I don’t like what you did to me, I don’t even like what you did to yourself.”
“I don’t like what I did either.
” Her eyes were serious. “Love means trust, and I broke that trust. I wanted to save my country but I lost something even more precious to me. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, because I love you, Nick. I never stopped loving you.” Tears welled in her eyes.
She meant everything in the world to me. No matter how hurt I was that she betrayed me, I never lost my longing for her. I knew she spoke the truth.
“I promise I will never hurt you again,” she said, as tears streamed down her face.
I knew her promise would be kept. My voice was lost in my throat. I pulled her to me and felt the warmth of her body. She buried her head against my chest.
“Never let me go, Nick.” Her arms tightened around me. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” I told her, as my own tears spilled down my face.
What she didn’t know was I had already forgiven her. When you love someone with all your heart and soul, you find a way to forgive. You may never forget, but love means forgiving.
True love never dies.
Historical Note
Nick’s evaluation of Ramfis as having too many soft landings to fill his father’s shoes was correct. Ramfis and Rubi did, in fact, come back from Europe after El Jefe was assassinated on his way to visit his mistress. But they didn’t stay long.
Ramfis lasted only about six months as dictator of the Dominican Republic. During that time, he wreaked revenge on the group that ambushed his father. After questioning and repeated torture, the captured conspirators were chopped up and fed to sharks. When the United States withdrew its support of Ramfis because it believed he was brewing a Castro-type revolt, he fled in his yacht, taking the untold millions that his father had robbed from the people during his thirty-year dictatorship.
Rubirosa also left the country, returning to Paris and his life as the most fabulous of the jetsetters. He was truly the ultimate man’s man, a sports star on the playing field and in bed, a person of great charm and intelligence.
Both Ramfis and Rubi died in auto accidents in the 1960s. No one knows whether it was coincidence, the fickle finger of fate, or darker forces at work.
Sam Giancana, the Chicago mobster, was gunned down in 1975 by “unknown assailants” after he was scheduled to appear before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss his involvement in a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 60s.
Las Mariposas, the Butterflies, died young and tragically, but they left behind them a rare heritage of national feminine heroism that ranks with Joan of Arc taking up sword and riding at the head of the French army.
The Mirabal sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, age thirty-seven, thirty-four and twenty-six respectively when they were viciously murdered by Trujillo’s secret police, are not just national heroines of the Dominican Republic, but to the world at large. They became a symbol of the crisis of violence against women.
In 1999, the fifty-fourth session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Resolution designating November twenty-five as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. November 25 was the date in 1960 that the three Butterflies were killed.
FORGE BOOKS
BY HAROLD ROBBINS
The Betrayers (with Junius Podrug)
Heat of Passion
Never Enough
Never Leave Me
The Predators
The Secret
Sin City
“Robbins’s sixth posthumus novel finds new cowriter Podrug outwitting the hormonal ghost.… Podrugs’s strong, crisp style excels.”
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE BETRAYERS
Copyright © 2004 by Jann Robbins and Junius Podrug
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
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Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-765-34721-0
EAN 978-0765-34721-3
First edition: September 2004
First mass market edition: July 2005
eISBN 9781466833692
First eBook edition: November 2012
The Betrayers Page 30